organisms are craggy surfaces

Organisms are craggy surfaces perched upon the precipice of a clime gradient, slowing the flow of energy through selective membranes in order to generate a charge by which it touches the face of god. 

Life is animate electricity. 

The Mechanicalness of Mimesis

"Growth is the work of creative personalities and creative minorities; they cannot go on moving forward themselves unless they can contrive to carry their fellows with them in their advance; and the uncreative rank and file of mankind, which is always the overwhelming majority, cannot be transfigured en masse and raised to the stature of their leaders in the twinkling of an eye. That would be in practice impossible; for the inward spiritual grace through which an unillumined soul is fired by communion with a saint is almost as rare as the miracle that has brought the saint himself into the world. The leader's task is to make his fellows his followers; and the only means by which mankind in the mass can be set in motion towards a goal beyond itself is by enlisting the primitive and universal faculty of mimesis. For this mimesis is a kind of social drill; and the dull ears that are deaf to the unearthly music of Orpheus' lyre are well attuned to the drill sergeant's word of command. When the Piper of Hamelin assumes king Frederick William's Prussian voice, the rank and file, who have stood stolid hitherto, mechanically break into movement, and the evolution which he causes them to execute bring them duly to heel; by they can only catch him up by taking a short cut, and they can only find room to march in formation by deploying on the broad way which leadeth to destruction. When they road to destruction has perforce to be trodden on the quest of life, it is perhaps no wonder that the quest should often end in disaster. 

"Moreover, there is a weakness in the actual exercise of mimesis, quite apart from the way in which the faculty may be exploited. For, just because mimesis is a kind of drill, it is a kind of mechanization of human life and movement.

"When we speak of 'an ingenious' mechanism' or 'a skilled mechanic', the words call up the idea of a triumph of life over matter, of human skill over physical obstacles. Concrete examples suggest the same idea, from the gramophone or the aeroplane back to the first wheel and the first dug-out canoe; for such inventions have extended man's power over his environment by so manipulating inanimate objects that they are made to carry out human purposes, as the drill sergeant's commands are executed by his mechanized human beings. In drilling his platoon the sergeant expands himself into a Briareus whose hundred arms and legs obey his will almost as promptly as if they had been organically his own. Similarly the telescope is an extension of the human eye, the trumpet of the human voice, the stilt of the human leg, the sword of the human arm. 

"Nature has implicitly complimented man on his ingenuity by anticipating him in his use of mechanical devices. She has made extensive use of them in her chef-d'oeuvre, the human body. In the heart and the lungs she has constructed two self-regulating machines that are models of their kind. By adjusting these and other organs so that they work automatically, Nature has released the margin of our energies from the monotonously repetitive task these organs perform, and has set these energies free to walk and talk and, in a word, bring into existence twenty-one civilizations! She has arranged that, say, ninety per cent. of the functions of any given organism shall be performed automatically and therefore with the minimum expenditure of energy, in order that the maximum amount of energy may be concentrated on the remaining ten per cent., in which Nature is feeling her way towards a fresh advance. In fact, a natural organism is made up, like a human society, of a creative minority and an uncreative majority of 'members'; and in a growing and healthy organism, as in a growing and healthy society, the majority is drilled into following the minority's lead mechanically.

"But, when he have lost ourselves in admiration of these natural and human mechanical triumphs, it is disconcerting to be reminded that there are other phrases--'machine-made goods', 'mechanical behavior'--in which the connotation of the word 'machine' is exactly the reverse, suggesting not the triumph of life over matter by the triumph of matter over life. Though machinery be designed to be the slave of man, it is also possible for man to become the slave of his machines. A living organism which is ninety per cent. mechanism will have greater opportunity or capacity for creativity than an organism which is fifty per cent. mechanism, as Socrates will have more time and opportunity to discover the secret of the Universe if he has not got to cook his own meals, but the organism that is a hundred per cent. mechanism is a robot.

"Thus a risk of catastrophe is inherent in the use of the faculty of mimesis which is the vehicle of mechanization in the social relationships of human beings; and it is evident that this risk will be greater when mimesis is called into play in a society which is in dynamic movement than in a society which is in a state of rest. The weakness of mimesis lies in its being a mechanical response to a suggestion from outside, so that the action performed is one which would never have been performed by the performer on his own initiative. Thus mimesis-action is not self-determined, and the best safeguard for its performance is that the faculty should become crystallized in habit of custom--as it actually is in primitive societies in the Yin-state. But when the 'cake of custom' is broken, the faculty of mimesis, hitherto directed backwards towards elders or ancestors as incarnations of an unchanging social tradition, is reoriented towards creative personalities bent upon leading their fellows with them towards a promised land. henceforth the growing society is compelled to live dangerously. Moreover the danger is perpetually imminent, since the condition which is required for the maintenance of growth is a perpetual flexibility and spontaneity, whereas the condition required for effective mimesis, which is itself a prerequisite for growth, is a considerable degree of machine-like automatism. The second of these requirements was what Walter Bagehot had in mind when, in his whimsical way he told his English readers that they owed their comparative successfulness as a nation in larger part to their stupidity. Good leaders, yes: but t he good leaders would not have had good followers if the majority of these followers had determined to think everything out for themselves. And yet, if all are 'stupid', where will be the leadership?

"In fact, creative personalities in the vanguard of a civilization who have recourse to the mechanism of mimesis are exposing themselves to the risk of failure in two degrees, one negative and the other positive.

"The possible negative failure is that the leaders may infect themselves with the hypnotism which they have induced in their followers. In that event, the docility of the rank and file will have been purchased at the disastrous price of a loss of initiative in the officers. This is what happened in the arrested civilizations, and in all periods in the histories of other civilizations which are to be regarded as periods of stagnation. This negative failure, however, is not usually the end of the story. When the leaders cease to lead, their tenure of power becomes an abuse. The rank and file mutiny; the officers seek to restore order by drastic action. Orpheus, who has lost his lyre or forgotten how to play it, now lays about him with Xerxes' whip; and the result is a hideous pandemonium, in which the military formation breaks down into anarchy. This is the positive failure; and we have already, again and again, used another name for it. It is that 'disintegration' of a broken-down civilization which declares itself in the 'secession of the proletariat' from a band of leaders who have degenerated into a 'dominant minority'. 

"This secession of the led from the leaders may be regarded as a loss of harmony between the parts which make up the whole ensemble of the society. In any whole consisting of parts a loss of harmony between the parts is paid for by the whole in a corresponding loss of self-determination. This loss of self-determination is the ultimate criterion of breakdown; and it is a conclusion which should not surprise us, seeing that it is the inverse of the conclusion, reached in an earlier part of this Study, that progress towards self-determination is the criterion of growth. We have not to examine some of the forms in which this loss of self-determination through loss of harmony is manifested."

Power above is power over

"The council was the Minimite form of self-government. It was their apparatus for reconciling differences and choosing technology. It was also the supreme test of willingness, or of self-surrender: only by first yielding power to one another and to what they regarded as the spirit of unity, a spirit from above, could the members wield it over machines" (p. 132).

"Put another way, Minimite councils depended on a secret similar to the one Mary and I had discovered while relaxing with the windows open in the evening: in true leisure there is mastery" (p. 133).

from: "Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology" by Eric Brende

The metagut hypothesis

The metagut is the gut of all guts, well, not all guts, just the guts that this metagut ends up consuming intentionally or not. By this I mean the metagut acquires its gut flora, over time, by the piece-meal consumption of other gut bacteria from the bugs, animals, and even bacteria consumed, all by necessity of hunger. 

As this metagut gives birth to its offspring, this child passes very near the exit of that metagut and is thus 'christened' in the funk of a gut and gains its flora. 

Have you ever seen a cladogram?

This is the tree of life, all branches of which lead to one common ancestor 3+ billion years ago. If one can imagine humanity, and the path it took along that tree, all the branches and subbranches its ancestry has passed through to where it is today we get a sense of the lifestyles and predation practices that could contribute to the metagut of humanity. Contained in all those predation patterns, those sustenance practices, all the ancestor organisms from which humanity came provide humans today with both a genomic artifact of this ancestry and an accompanying microbiome, which offers up a sort of unbroken continuity between 3+ billion years ago and now. From the virulent unicellular organism to the colony biofilm into the highly specialized cooperative cell community that is today's organismic life all that accumulated biomolecular programming is both a memory of its past forms and the very scaffolding upon which this current human lifeform is draped like the sheet of a ghost. 

What's important to note is the importance of a gut to the branch of eukaryota to which we belong. Our ancestors didn't, like other lifeforms, form a house for the photosynthetic bacterial analogues, which became chloroplasts, but instead they formed a house for a molecule-to-energy transformer known as the mitochondrion, which, itself, is a vestige of the cooperative unicellular oceanic soup from which all our ancestry derived. This body, its homeostatic parameters, and the biomolecular landmarks provide the keen observer with a museum of some ancient oceanic location that it carries around within itself, specifically forming a within in a double sense. Our class of organisms are discrete locations of ambulatory cells apart from the environment. The gut serves as a sort of interface, a Love Canal if you will, where organism and world find a specific homeostatic environment that perhaps mimics those ancient oceanic conditions where all these biomolecules first learned to form their initial 'within' and interact at that level. This initial within would be the discrete cell, itself, that unit, which had learned how to communicate, cooperate, and coordinate within morphospace with its neighbors. It would find a seemingly higher goal-based unity together that it could coordinate in real-time through manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum made manifestly available through voltage differences propagated and held within the selective cell membrane, that very thing that established a within, the thing which set the cellular material apart from its environment. 

It's easy to veer off into nonsense land in this discussion. That isn't to say that my attempt here at being concise and somewhat clear in my understanding of life as an organizational pattern of physical phenomena and temporal continuity has failed. This continuity happens by virtue of life's programmatic replication of its basic unit, the cell, to grow itself out and continue against senescence to maintain itself for a length of time.

Training the Janissary

The Ottoman system deliberately took slaves and made them ministers of state. It took boys from the sheep-run and the plough-tail and made them courtiers and the husbands of princesses; it took young men whose ancestors had borne the Christian name for centuries, and made them rulers in the greatest of Mohammadan states, and soldiers and generals in invincible armies whose chief joy was to beat down the Cross and elevate the Crescent. ... Grandly disregarding the fabric of fundamental customs which is called "human nature", and those religious and social prejudices which are thought to be almost as deep as life itself, the Ottoman system took children forever from their parents, discouraged family cares among its members through their most active years, allowed them no certain hold upon property, gave them no definite promise that their sons and daughters would profit by their success and sacrifice, raised and lowered them with no regard for ancestry or previous distinction, taught them a strange law, ethics, and religion, and ever kept them conscious of a sword raised above their heads which might put an end at any moment to a brilliant career along a matchless path of human glory. (p. 210)

...

It is always the way of the Turks, whenever they come into possession of a man of uncommonly good parts, to rejoice and be exceedingly glad, as though they had found a pearl of great price. And, in bringing out all that there is in him, they leave nothing undone that labour and thought can do--especially where they recognize military aptitude. Our Western way is different indeed! In the West, if we come into possession of a good dog or hawk or horse, we are delighted, and we spare nothing in our efforts to bring the creature to the highest perfection of which its kind is capable. In the case of a man, however--supposing that we happen to come upon a man of signal endowments--we do not take anything like the same pains, and we do not consider that his education is particularly our business. So we Westerners obtain many sorts of pleasure and service  from a well-broken-in horse, dog and hawk, while the Turks obtain from a man whose character has been cultivated by education the vastly greater return that is afforded by the vast superiority and preeminence of human nature over the rest of the animal kingdom.

(pp. 211-212)

as quoted in Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History: Volume One"

Appalachian Devo

The modern Ulstermen, however, are not the only surviving overseas representattives of this stock; for the Scottish pioneers who migrated to Ulster begot 'Scotch-Irish' descendants who re-emigrated in the eighteenth century from Ulster to North America, and these survive to-day in the fastness of the Appalachian Mountains, a highland zone which runs through half a dozen states of the American union from Pennsylvania to Georgia. What has been the effect of this second transplantation? In the seventeenth century the subjects of King James crossed St. George's Channel and took to fighting the Wild Irish instead of the Wild Highlanders. In the eighteenth century their great-grandchildren crossed the Atlantic to become 'Indian fighters' in the American backwoods. Obviously this American challenge has been more formidable than the Irish challenge in both its aspects, physical and human. Has the increased challenge evoked an increased response? If we compare the Ulsterman and the Appalachian of to-day, two centuries after they parted company, we shall find that the answer is once again in the negative. The modern Appalachian has not only not improved on the Ulsterman; he has failed to hold his ground and has gone downhill in a most disconcerting fashion. In fact, the Appalachian 'mountain people' to-day are no better than barbarians. They have relapsed into illiteracy and witchcraft. They suffer from poverty, squalor and ill-health. They are the American counterparts of the latter-day White barbarians of the Old World--Rifis, Albanians, Kurds, Pathans and Hairy Ainus; but, whereas these latter are belated survivals of an ancient barbarism, the Appalachians present the melancholy spectacle of a people who have acquired civilization and then lost it.   (pp. 179-180) 

as cited in Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History: Volume One"

Killing Mrs. Collins

"'November 27. Got one fox and seven grouse; killed Mrs. Collins. She weighed 250 pounds.'

Mrs. Collins, in case it hasn't been guessed was our pig that we had brought along for a midwinter treat" (p. 167).

 from Carston H. Bodfish and Joseph C. Allen's "Chasing the Bowhead"